Stitching Together Solidarity, Creating A Community

There’s an emptiness we can all feel that’s just out of reach. It’s something we can’t touch or taste, something that sits on the tips of our tongues and on the edge of our lips. Religious people might define it as a lack of spirituality or sickness of the soul. Folks who aren’t can find any number of disorders or emotional and mental states to try to explain it. But the truth is, it’s something a little more.

And we try to fill that hole, that emptiness, with things every day. Some people do it with money and material goods, some do it with booze or pills, others with work, or a quest for power and authority, and some shut down and spend their days in the dark watching hours of television. Whatever it is though, however we choose to try to fill that void it’s never enough. And it will never be enough, so long as we continue to ignore that the very fabric of the world we live in is threadbare.

Because the world is broken. Because shit’s fucked up. Because shit’s fucked up and bullshit. Because things have been so fucked up for so long, so many of us don’t even know where to start to fix it. Because we shouldn’t ignore the fact that the things we’re shopping for while bombs are dropping are made by slave labor. We should do something about the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people in prisons across the planet who might never see the sunlight again. Because it’s more than an outrage that while a nation can afford to spend 8 billion dollars on an aircraft carrier, it can’t afford to help the sick, the hungry, or the mentally ill. But it’s no one specific person’s fault, no one political party or group of people can be blamed for generations of problems. No one issue can simply be fixed to solve it all.

I think about all the people that I’ve met and what brought them to the place they are. Whether they’re doing prison solidarity work, fighting racism fascism or sexism, trying to stop wars, defend civil rights, feed the hungry and find funding for mental health care; or the ones who are able to go home, shut the door, and pretend that it’s not happening. I think about what I learned and what I feel each time I’m in the street, and the times I decide to stay home and ignore the ills of the world. And the biggest thing I think I’ve learned is that the emptiness we all feel could be filled by building a community.